Historic Durham Drive-Ins
I'm preparing a workshop for teaching Google Fusion Tables to a group of writing students learning about Spatial Humanities. Fusion Tables is an ideal tool for the assignment. The amount of data required is low (10 to 20 items), the tool host, Google (or Google Drive), is familiar. Terms like "geocoding" or "geolocating" may be a new concept for the students but locating objects on a map will be well understood.
In preparation, I created this example Fusion Table from sources across the Web. The table shows the location of the 8-9 drive-in theaters which once existed in Durham, NC. All the theaters are now closed, some are abandoned but still exist, others have long been paved-over and cultivated for new uses.
Geolocating these old drive-in locations demonstrate many stories. Among them, we can imply, visually, the growth of a city. It's important to understand that Drive-in theaters would have been intentionally placed "out in the country," in a rural settings. Years later, seeing those same locations displayed on a current map, we can demonstrate how rural landscapes are retooled into suburban and exurban landscapes.
Additionally, the historic information is sparse. By visually representing the information we found -- and documented in the "about this table" section -- we can comment about name changes and validity of surviving information. For example we can suggest the Forest Drive-In and the Skyview Drive-In may have actually been the same place; it may have gone through a name change over the years. By locating and providing citations for the theaters we are able to document what seems to be an unlikely proximity of the two theaters. This proximity may have been harder to tease out without the aid of geolocating the points as part of the spatial humanities toolset. Furthermore, in our historical analysis we may choose to identify this unlikely proximity issue. Could this be one location with a name change, or is it two locations?
As noted, citations for supporting information of this project can be placed inside the "About this Table" section visible by description at the top of the fusion tables page. Other features include the ability to use special Icons to represent the unique features, in this case theaters.
